January 22 is the date when this year’s Oscar nominees are to be announced. Among the shortlisted works is Julia Loktev’s five-hour documentary “My Undesirable Friends. Part I — Last Air in Moscow”, about young Russian women journalists who were labeled “foreign agents” in the autumn of 2021.
Loktev said she shot the film alone in Moscow, serving as director, camera operator, sound recordist, and producer. One of the film’s protagonists, Anna Nemzer, became a co-director, while Loktev edited the project with Michael Taylor, who, she said, helped identify what foreign viewers would need explained about Russia.
The director left Leningrad in 1978 at the age of nine and grew up in Colorado, speaking Russian mostly only with her parents for many years. In 1991, she traveled alone across Central Asia and then spent several months in Russia, arriving there during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
According to Loktev, the Russia she observed between 1991 and 2022 kept changing dramatically. She met the future protagonists of the film in the last prewar years through a circle of journalists and activists. She had initially considered male subjects as well, but by autumn 2021 many of them had already left the country after searches and growing pressure, so the film focused on those who were still in Russia.
Loktev said the running time of 324 minutes was essential to her idea: rather than simply delivering information, the film was meant to let viewers live alongside its protagonists and experience their daily routines, fears, and attachments. The documentary was shot on an iPhone from very close range to create a sense of intimate presence.
“American audiences generally think this is a film about them. Critics in the United States watch it and say: ‘My God, this is us, this is about us.’”
The director also described the parallels between developments in Russia and events in the United States as painful to watch. She referred to troubling reports about searches involving a Washington Post journalist and said that people should do everything they can while they still can: protest, speak out, and refuse to normalize what is happening. She added that after the war in Ukraine began, all of the film’s protagonists left Russia within the first week, and that story will form the basis of the second part, “Exile”.